proximity

American  

[prok-sim-i-tee] / prɒkˈsɪm ɪ ti /

noun

• proximities
  plural

1. nearness in place, time, order, occurrence, or relation; closeness.

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proximity British  

/ prɒkˈsɪmɪtɪ /

noun

1. nearness in space or time

2. nearness or closeness in a series

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• nonproximity
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• proximities
  plural

Etymology

Origin of proximity

First recorded in 1475–85; late Middle English; from Middle French proximité, from Latin proximitāt-, stem of proximitās “nearness, adjacent area, vicinity”

Explanation

The word proximity means nearness or closeness. "Because of the proximity of our desks, I couldn't help but notice him cheating on the exam." Your favorite thing about your neighborhood of attached row houses might be the proximity of your neighbors — they're really close to you. Proximity comes from the Latin proximus, "nearest," which also gives us approximate, "close to the actual." You can use this noun to talk about a physical closeness, or something that's near in time, like the proximity of the months April and May.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

proximity proximities

Despite her close proximity to Pence as a trans woman, Curlee noted that his views did not impact her work.

From Barron's ● Aug. 26, 2026

But alliances can withstand a lot of friction—physical proximity alone probably makes a wholesale U.S.-Canada divorce impossible—and escalation isn’t guaranteed.

From Slate ● Aug. 25, 2026

Online flight trackers spotted a Boeing C-17 Globemaster flying from Riga, Latvia, to Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport, long used by top visiting officials because of its relative proximity to the capital’s center.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 25, 2026

The problem for Prince William now is proximity.

From BBC ● Aug. 21, 2026

The relative importance of local invention and of borrowing depends mainly on two factors: the ease of invention of the particular technology, and the proximity of the particular society to other societies.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Dickens’s readers balk at his use of caricature and coincidence, but as Mr. Keefe shows, both are appropriate for a money-mad city full of affluence and anonymity, weird proximities and sudden death.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 10, 2026

A mathematical model that could predict the speeds and proximities for electrons jumping into the ion would thus have to keep track of all those interactions simultaneously.

From Scientific American ● Sep. 2, 2021

The close proximities, the swapped sweat, faces inches apart when they’re not pressed together, all of it certainly seems like a risk during a global pandemic with a highly contagious virus.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 2, 2021

At its best, his novel not only exults in the historical synchronicities and proximities he has discovered but catches the reader up in its rapture.

From New York Times ● Feb. 20, 2019

For instance, Perrey has gone over 15,000 records of earthquakes, and he has correlated many with proximities of the moon, or has attributed many to the pull of the moon when nearest this earth.

From The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

Related Words

• closeness